Beginning my Praxis capstone, I set out on a month of strengthening my skills in storytelling. I see storytelling as a basis of everything we do, it’s creative, it’s fun, and it strengthens my marketing, communication, and critical thinking skills. In this post I’m going to spend some time going over what went well, what went wrong, and what I learned in the past month–in storytelling fashion.

When beginning my capstone planning I had a long laundry list of skills that I wanted to strengthen. So much so, that it was challenging for me to narrow down my subjects of focus. Knowing that I only have three months left–I boiled down my list and got creative. Ultimately deciding on storytelling, copywriting, and digital design. When combined together, they give me a strong set of skills to build upon in the writing, marketing, and advertising space.

I chose to do storytelling in the form of a 28-day challenge…. and I quickly got off to a bad start with some silly mistakes.

After finding more clarity into what I was doing, I began the challenge on a Tuesday. Since it was the middle of the week I jumped right into it–not taking the time to write out a formal “beginning” post or organize how exactly it would flow. This came back to bite me, because a goal of mine was to experiment with video and photo storytelling as well. It quickly became too much at once with my current schedule.

Additionally, one of my other personal goals was to stay on top of “respecting my own time”. This didn’t look like storytelling until 1am just to get a post done. With dichotomies in my goals, and a personal schedule that was already at capacity, I set myself up for failure.

And within this, I learned some valuable lessons. One being that you can’t be the master of everything you set out on. Small chunks, and taking the time to learn things fully, is so important. When taking such a broad approach to “storytelling” it can mean so many things. Even though I was making my own rules, I found myself confused as to what I was doing myself.

At the end of the day, I published a good chunk of stuff in this time. A lot of it was bad, some I’m proud of. Below I will include two pieces of work:

It’s notable to mention, that even though I wasn’t publishing as expected, this was one of my biggest months of personal growth. In this past month of storytelling I had a lot of things change and evolve in my life. I gained so much clarity as to who I am and where I’m meant to be going. I learned more about who I’m writing to and why. I got heavily involved in a Jiu Jitsu gym. I am now feeling more confident about narrowing down my interests.

And the biggest thing–after intentionally forgoing the “job hunt” module, I now have gained a really positive and unexpected job opportunity that speaks to my core being, as a teacher in alternative education.

So, after everything this month had to bring me, I am ending it better than it started and moving forward with new direction to my next subject of focus: copywriting.